Art Meets ScienceArt Exhibition Immortalizes Switzerlands Rhne Glacier, Predicted to Disappear by 2050Ohan Breidings Belly of a Glacier combines experimental film and photography to reflect on a moment of lossand to fight against it Photographs of the Rhne glacier and the attempts to save it Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary ArtIn 2019, researchers installed a memorial for the first Icelandic glacier to disappear due to climate change. The plaque at the base of what was once theOkjkull glacier read: In the next 200 years, all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.In the past six years, glaciers have not stopped melting. Researchers have predicted that more than half of the worlds glaciers coulddisappear by 2100.Funerals and memorials continue.The latest effort to reflect on these losses is Belly of a Glacier, an experimental film and photography exhibition by Swiss-American artistOhan Breiding, which will be on view at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art through mid-December.The focus of Breidings exhibition is SwitzerlandsRhne glacier, which feeds the Rhne river and Lake Geneva. In recent decades, it has melted with alarming speed: It loses roughly33 feet of ice thickness annually. Scientistspredict that the Swiss Alps will lose half of their glacier volume by 2050.None of us was prepared for what it would feel like to open this show in this exact moment with what were facing in climate disasters across the world,Lisa Dorin, the deputy director at theWilliams College Museum of Art, which presents the exhibition in collaboration with Mass MoCA, tells theArt Newspapers Barbara Reina.In a half-hour film, which theBerkshire Eagles Jennifer Huberdeau calls one part documentary, one part eulogy, Breiding captures residents of Obergoms, a Swiss village, draping the Rhne glacier withthermal blankets to insulate it from the rising temperatures. Thermal blanket draped across the Rhne glacier Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary ArtBreiding intersperses sounds of a glacier losing chunks of ice with close-up footage of a calf emerging from its mothers birth canala play on the word calving.Calving is for the mother calf to give birth to a calf, but in glaciologists terms, its about the death of a glacier, about the breaking off of a big iceberg into a glacial lake, or an ocean, Breiding tells theWilliams Records Tahlia Gerger and Amita Khurana.The film also spotlights researchers at the National Science FoundationsIce Core Facility in Colorado. Drilled from glaciers, ice cores preserve key climatic data over time. Visitors can watch the short film while sitting on ice core boxes. Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary ArtI became just so deeply fascinated with ice as one of our oldest record keepers of time, Breiding says to the Berkshire Eagle.Like the ice cores, Belly of a Glacier creates a record of the earths changing climate, freezing the Rhne glacier in time and allowing viewers to enjoy its beauty, even as it melts away in real life.Weve never experienced [these changes] as humans. Weve never experienced a loss of something thats so ancient within our short lifetimes, and so its about what our feelings are doing and the loss thats deeply inside of us, and what were going to do with that loss, Breiding tells the Williams Record. A plaque memorializing a lost glacier Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary ArtA wall of 111 photographs titled To dress a wound from the light that shines in it features images of the Rhne glacier from various perspectives, including shots of the villagers trying to protect it with blankets. These photos are interspersed with close-up shots of parts of the artists body.The stunning photographs and video make the loss feel very personalas it should, given that we are part of the ecosystem being forever transformed by climate change, saysSusan Cross, a curator at the museum, in astatement.Belly of a Glacier is on view at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams through December 14, 2025. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.